March 18, 2024

Migrating From Tableau to Sigma? Here are 5 Things to Consider

March 18, 2024

More businesses are looking for ways to integrate their business intelligence and data platforms into their long-term business strategy. Because of this, many organizations are looking for alternatives to stand-alone BI tools such as Tableau.

As the frequency of Tableau to Sigma migrations increases, several vital things must be considered when making this organizational change to ensure the long-term success of your new Sigma platform.

Data infrastructure and connectivity

For those who have become accustomed to using Tableau over the years, using only Live Connections may be daunting, but do not fear—Sigma is here!

Tableau is most performant when using data extracts—copies of data outside your data platform. Although most business intelligence use cases only require periodic refreshes—daily, weekly, or monthly—creating copies of your finely curated data models from your data warehouse or data lakehouse creates inherent risk.

Once data has been copied from your data platform, all scrutiny applied to data governance, security, and validation is lost. Users can then transform and shape the data as they see fit, eliminating the data platform as the single source of truth.

With Sigma, you always leverage a live connection to your data warehouse, making it easier for organizations to maintain governance over their data models.

When migrating from Tableau to Sigma, you will not have to worry about extracting refresh schedules or the capacity of your Tableau Server. Instead, users connect directly to the models created in your data platform.

Because Sigma relies on the data platform as its semantic layer instead of an extract, transitioning organizations must align their data engineering and architecture teams to Sigma's business reporting needs. This alignment should include data models, business logic, consumption estimates, and security and governance concerns.

User experience and visualizations

For a long time, Tableau has been considered the top tool in data visualization. While Tableau does a lot of things right when it comes to visualization, more is needed to solve one of the core issues facing organizations today—how to scale data usage within an organization in an actionable and user-friendly way. Sigma takes the approach of taking the spreadsheet to the Cloud—the most common way business users interact with data.

Sigma focuses its visualizations on the most common chart types across business users—which is by design. Many consumers of analytics and business intelligence have limited data skills. For those consumers to understand the insights best, Sigma focuses developers on chart types that will be easy for data consumers to understand. This makes developing dashboards in Sigma significantly more straightforward than developing Tableau.

To summarize, Sigma offers all of the standard data visualization chart types compared to the highly complex visuals found in Tableau, but this is more of a blessing than a curse.

When migrating from Tableau to Sigma, you will find very few visualizations that can’t be directly recreated in Sigma. The questions these scenarios answer can often be quickly answered using a different chart type.

More often than not, dashboard users will either find a story in the data or try to answer a question about their business with their dashboard, which means they ultimately need to drill down into the most granular levels of data. It is tough to drill down into granular levels of data in Tableau.

Be designed, Sigma drills down into different grains of data. Remember these use cases in your migrations—users prefer this workflow to a traditional dashboard.

Governance and security

Tableau allows organizations to govern access to their platform at various levels, including site, project, and dashboard-level access. These different access levels can be handy for segmenting user groups to ensure high data governance and security levels.

Sigma takes a different approach to security for a good reason. With Sigma, organizations can use the security groups already established in their data lake or data warehouse and apply those same permissions to the data being used in Sigma.

This means roles are seamlessly applied to Sigma users if you use a platform like Snowflake. This is huge for businesses because it aligns the use of data within an organization with the security and governance measures taken by central IT teams.

Sigma’s platform design ensures high ROI from data platforms in which organizations invest heavily and reduces business-level business intelligence costs. In addition, Sigma provides the ability to perform Column-Level Security (CLS) and Row-Level Security (RLS) natively in the tool.

When migrating from Tableau to Sigma, organizations must shift their mindset from handling security independently in the business intelligence platform to more cohesive governance and security between the data and business intelligence platforms.

Sigma’s cohesive security architecture allows for a far lower-touch and complex security model, saving companies migrating to Sigma loads of time, energy, and, ultimately, money. So, when making this shift, organizations must ensure their new security and access policies are aligned with how Sigma operates most efficiently.

Cost and ROI

Like any long-standing software, Tableau’s price has increased faster than new features or capabilities have been introduced.

Additionally, much of Tableau’s full capabilities are only accessible via various add-ons with your Salesforce contract. These add-ons, such as Data Management and Tableau Advanced Managed, are often costly and not priced in a budget-friendly manner.

Between the high price of Tableau creator licenses ($75 per user per month) and expensive add-ons, Tableau comes at a hefty price for most organizations.

Sigma can have some variability regarding licensing costs, but generally, the pricing consists of an annual platform fee and individual licensing.

An important thing to note is viewers of Sigma content are free! On the other hand, Tableau’s Viewers licenses are $15 per user per month.

When migrating from Tableau to Sigma, it is essential to determine the direct impact of licensing costs. By having only two primary sources of licensing cost, Sigma’s cost model is inherently far less complex and buyer-friendly than Tableau’s licensing model—as there are no additional expensive add-ons to access Sigma’s unique and differentiating features. Most importantly, there isn’t an additional tax in the form of per-user per-month costs associated with having more users adopting workbooks, dashboards, and enterprise data.

Scalability and support

One of Tableau’s main selling points has been “speed to insight.” While Tableau supports this, it only supports data democratization for technical data analysts.

Sigma, on the other hand, makes enterprise data democratization easy by emulating spreadsheets and providing users with highly intuitive calculation language and chart-building capabilities.

Accelerating adoption is the time to upskill individuals with lower levels of data proficiency. These users can pick up Sigma in as little as a couple of hours.

Adoption becomes even more accessible with Sigma’s world-class customer support. Sigma’s support team's average response time is a mere 23 seconds, with an 86% first-touch resolution rate and a 96% overall customer satisfaction rate with their support experience.

A significant reason for this fantastic customer support experience is the ease of the Sigma product. Another reason is that Sigma truly cares about its customers and their experience on the platform—a far cry from pay-to-play customer support, which gives customers average support times between three weeks and three months.

When migrating from Tableau to Sigma, organizations must prepare for the widespread proliferation of Sigma throughout their organization due to its ease of use and effectiveness in solving everyday business problems. Do not hesitate to contact Sigma’s customer support when transitioning from Tableau to Sigma–they will answer!

Conclusion

More and more companies are migrating from Tableau to Sigma because of data's vital role in their organization.

Sigma improves data reliability and control by establishing real-time data connections, providing businesses with insights and a robust security framework. The transition to a spreadsheet-like user experience that maintains enterprise-grade security makes data accessible to all and maximizes an organization’s investment in its data.

These five considerations will help you and your organization make the change:

Improved Data Governance: Sigma ensures real-time accuracy and security, maintaining a single truth source.
Intuitive Analysis: Offers a user-friendly, spreadsheet-like interface, making data insights more accessible.
Cost Savings and ROI: Transparent pricing and no costly add-ons lead to better budget use.
Unified Platform: Effortlessly integrates with current data warehouses, supporting growth without hassle.

Exceptional Support: Quick, effective customer service enhances the migration and usage experience.

If you are interested in making the change, start your free trial today!